Items pictured but not listed are from
private collections, or no additional details
are available.

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94 WNTER/SPRNG 2019 SPACES SPACES W N TER/SPRNG 2019
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OUT of the BOX

“IT SOUNDS CRAZY BUT IT’S GONNA WORK.”
This was architect David Wilson’s silent mantra when he first hatched the
plan to build a temporary dwelling inside his house in the Berkeley Hills.
The “crate,” as Wilson referred to it, would allow him and his wife, physician Stacia Cronin, to remain in their home during planned renovations
instead of moving into a costly rental.

Wilson and Cronin are empty-nesters whose kids are grown. They
decided to embark on their architectural adventure after purchasing an
unassuming 1,000-square-foot prewar cottage in 2011. Its large level lot
and expansive bay views were hard to come by, and they devised a two-step
renovation that would let them completely transform the house without
tearing it down and starting from scratch.

The first phase involved the street-facing side of the house. Acting as his
own general contractor, Wilson enclosed a carport to form a garage and
entry courtyard, added a bedroom and updated the kitchen.

The couple lived with this initial update for a few years while they
perfected their approach for an even more ambitious phase two. They
finalized plans to reorganize the living spaces and add a second-story
master suite above a spacious dining room addition.

That would mean months of construction, but “we just didn’t want to
move,” Wilson says.

ARCHITECT DAVID
WILSON BUILT A CRATE
IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS
HOME RENOVATION
CONSTRUCTION SITE
SO HE AND HIS WIFE
WOULDN’T HAVE TO
MOVE OUT.

BY SARAH MOLINE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID WILSON

Opposite: Architect David
Wilson’s new master bedroom floats atop the enlarged
living spaces below it. During
construction, a boxed-in area
with a window that incoporated
the kitchen and dining areas
became the family’s temporary
home. The new staircase has
figured wood cladding and the
dining table has a live edge.

PHOTOCREDTPHOTOCREDT

100 WNTER/SPRNG 2019 SPACES SPACES WN TER/SPRNG 2019
101

“I DON’T MISS THE CITY AT ALL,”
Marilyn Coon Stocke, a former schoolteacher who is now a bookkeeper
in Sonoma, says. “I have a become a country girl.”
Her transformation began inadvertently nearly six years ago, when her
architect, George Bevan, invited Healdsburg-based landscape architect
Michael Lucas to help design her weekend garden.

Stocke had owned six neglected acres of Sonoma farmland for 15 years
and was finally ready to build north of Sausalito, where she lived. Over the
years, she had begun to love her patch of Sonoma, even though, with it
being so close to tidal flats, the groundwater is boron-infused and, without
a sheltered courtyard — let alone a house — her property was too windy
to inhabit on most afternoons.

Luckily, when Lucas came on board, Bevan hadn’t yet designed her
house, and the 19th-century Mission San Francisco Solano, which is
minutes away, became a font of ideas for ways to live indoors as well
as outdoors. Inspired by what they saw there, Lucas and Bevan, who
have frequently worked together, toyed with a paradise garden theme
and arrived at a master plan: an enclosed 2,500-square-foot walled garden
sheltered in part by an equally large L-shaped house.

“Marilyn’s property was full of tumbleweeds and decrepit,” Lucas recalls.
Overrun with weeds, poison oak and the remnants of on old pear orchard,
it was “spooky, but it still had a sense of place and a certain mystique.”
Clearing fire-prone brush became a priority, but native oaks and eucalyptus trees growing on the site, a safe distance from where the house now
stands, were saved.

The garden walls as well as the house, like the mission, are finished with
low-cost white stucco. In the center of the courtyard Lucas fashioned an
arresting 25-foot-long by four-foot-wide concrete reflecting pool, edged
sparingly with more durable white Wisconsin limestone that echoes early
western watering troughs for horses.

The entrance to Marilyn Coon Stocke’s garden designed by landscape architect
Michael Lucas of the Healdsburg firm Lucas and Lucas is a study in contrasts:
drought resistant and deliberately wild and untamed outside its white garden wall,
and lush, green and irrigated inside.

PARADISE

CALLING

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT MICHAEL LUCAS WAS INSPIRED BY A WESTERN WILDERNESS
IN SONOMA, WHERE HE CREATED A CALIFORNIA MISSION–STYLE WALLED GARDEN. .